Women still work on uneven field

Women just can't catch a break at the office these days, if you believe the results of two new studies.

One, released last week, shows that male managers married to full-time homemakers are less likely than men married to working women to promote female staffers or pay them the same as they pay males. The other, out this week, shows women managers are no more likely than male managers to promote women or pay them equally.

So if women and men are equally unlikely to look out for women at work, how are some getting ahead? That multifaceted question has a multipronged answer.

First, it depends which study you are more likely to believe. I'm more inclined to believe the first study's findings, and not just because I'm a women's rights advocate. Sreedhari Desai, a University of North Carolina assistant professor in business who's in the Harvard Kennedy School's women and public policy program personally gathered its data. She surveyed 1,200 men in the United States and Great Britain over six years. Although mixing Brits and Americans skews the data for either country, it's a large sample.

The second study examined data gathered from a large U.S. bank at which women represented 44 percent of all branch managers and about 75 percent of all employees. MIT doctoral student Mabel Abraham surveyed 68 branches, looking at five job categories from tellers to executives.

Abraham looked at a snapshot in time rather than a progression over a multiyear period. That is not to say I disagree with her findings. Banking is a notoriously conservative field, and women still face routine pay and promotional discrimination in finance, even from female bosses who may feel constrained to hire and promote according to industry standards.

The first survey also makes more intuitive sense. As Desai wrote in the study, men married to stay-at-home wives have very different life experiences than do men whose wives are hacking it out in the career world just as they are.

"Home environments can shape the way we behave at work," she noted. "People are daily 'border crossers' between the domains of work and family," and they tend to repeat the behavioral habits they form at home when they are in the workplace.

This is not to exonerate women who fail to offer a hand up to women who work for them. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright famously said there is a cold place in hell for women who don't help other women.

I had the awful experience of working for a woman who engaged with, socialized with and promoted males who worked for her and ignored and isolated her female employees. It was my first big job in television and was hugely disappointing because I'd been so excited to have the opportunity to work for her.

Far be it for me to claim it's always better for a woman to work for a female manager. I have had many male bosses and mentors who were much more supportive than was that particular woman.

So which study are we to believe? They are both accurate in different ways. Women are making great gains in the workplace, but there are still plenty more to be made. Sometimes, male bosses are kinder to their female underlings, and other times women are more likely to give other women a hand up.